My presumption is that it's mostly Scrabble freaks and crossword junkies (like myself,) who are remotely interested in this kind of thing, none the less, it's always interesting purely for the insight into the culture that it gives. English language learners probably hate it, because it just means that there's more stuff that they won't understand, although perhaps having some of these words in the Oxford English Dictionary helps matters considerably in terms of understanding, and making yourself understood in a more natural way. It's a bit odd to think that this book could conceivably grow larger, though, especially since I recall several teachers of my acquaintance having antique OEDs which were at least 8 inches thick, and probably weighed close to 50 pounds, if not more. Maybe it's the dead words that leave that make the difference.
Anyhoo… The latest additions to the Oxford English Dictionary are a mixed bag.
Many of us welcome autumn for bringing gorgeous weather, Octoberfest beers, and the merciful resumption of football.
But for a small number of your fellow citizens, fall brings another blessed event, one that is no less heaven-sent because it occurs every season: the Oxford English Dictionary online hauls out a host of new entries, as the largest word book in the world gets even larger.
As always, the additions are a mixed bag, a bag commodious enough to include words diverse as “dot-org,” “globalist,” “hand relief,” “red state,” “three-way,” and “unmixed blessing,” plus many others, along with a beefing up of major entries such as “clone,” “drug,” and “thought.”
The OED—started in 1857 and digitally updated since 2000—is a historical dictionary, which means it includes example sentences over a wide period of time. This makes it so much more useful than most other word books, since you can actually see the word in action. It’s like learning about frogs by watching them hop around a pond instead of dead on a desk in high school bio class.
So please enjoy this sample platter of linguistic nuggets and lexical enchiladas from the latest revisions, which are only a week old. As always, these facts should dazzle that English grad student you’ve been drooling over in the coffee shop, and maybe they’ll even invite you over for a cozy night of citing on the couch.
• Twitter is on everyone’s mind and handheld device these days, but the word “twitterpated” has zip to do with it, and its recent entry is a coincidence. Two meanings—“Love-struck, besotted. Also: thrilled, excited; obsessed” and “Foolish, silly; flighty, scatterbrained”—date from the 1940’s, launched by the 1942 Bambi movie.
• Who says having your nose in a digital library all day can’t lead to a greater appreciation for nature? Since the additions also covered extensive revisions from “red” to “refulgent,” subentries were added for the red-kneed tarantula, red-chested cuckoo, red-backed salamander, red-legged locust, red-lipped snake, and red-rumped parakeet. In related news, the red-handed howler monkey is now on my list of awesomely named animals that are a little impolite, along with the goliath bird-eating spider, naked mole rat, and giant spitting earthworm.
• My rare-word itch was well-scratched by “thinking mug”—a term labeled slang, obscure, and rare—for the head, with only one recorded use in 1849: “Bout four years ago, it came into my thinking mug that there must be plenty of gold in the bed of Coosa creek.”
• The recency illusion, as coined by University of Stanford linguist Arnold Zwicky, is the tendency to think “Whoa, that’s new to me. It must be new to the world!” I had a little bout of the recency illusion with the word “thoughty,” which has meant “thoughtful” for centuries, as here in 1702: “A minister should be a very thoughty man.” This is similar to how 19th-century uses of “truthiness” meant truthful, as opposed to today’s Colbertian truthiness, which encompasses many types of BS such as “globaloney,” another new entry. That one goes back to 1943: “Much of what Mr. Wallace calls his global thinking is, no matter how you slice it, still ‘globaloney’.”
• Regular readers know I’m entranced by suffix mayhem, such as the promiscuous ways of “-gate” and “-istan.” So I was happy to see the suffix “-think”—as in groupthink and doublethink—get its own entry. A 1984 quote has my favorite example (“This is yet another example of ninny-think.”) though I hope to someday be known as the founder and seminal contributor to doofus-think.
• You’re probably familiar with the common sense of “batsh*t,” even if batsh*t insanity doesn’t flow through the branches of your family tree (not that I would know anything about that). But an almost opposite meaning exists in Australia, perhaps due to blander bat diets: “My personal life is the same as anyone else’s and it’s as boring as batsh*t to read about.”
• Of course, capturing the world in words isn’t all red-handed monkeys and thoughty twitterpations: ugly reality intrudes, this time in the form of the mega-successful word “waterboarding.” The first known use is as recent as 2004; minus the “ing,” the term is older: “Upon capture the ‘POWs’ are roughed up and given their first taste of the dread water board: they are strapped head down onto an inclined board, with a towel placed over their faces and cold water poured onto it. They choke, gag, retch and gurgle” (1976).
• Also dating from 1976 is the basketball and general-purpose insult “in your face!” Speaking of faces, the first face-plant was probably done by a clumsy cave-dude, but we’ve only been talking about “doing a face plant” since the eighties.
• “Anyhoo” is a word I enjoy using, and it turns out I’m using it “right,” which to dictionary-makers just means in the most common way: “used (humorously) to indicate a change of topic, or a return to a previous topic after a digression.” I was surprised to learn that it was originally a regional pronunciation of “anyhow” and disappointed to learn that variations “anyhoozle” and “anyhoodle” didn’t make the cut (yet).
Anyhoo, I could go on till 2012, or even the apocalypse after that: there’s no end to this stuff. People sometimes wonder if I feel bad not knowing another language, and I don’t. I feel like I barely know one language. The OED will give you that feeling, in the best way possible.

In other news, well, I've commented about a LOT of things lately, and one of the ones that really bugs me is the surge in anti-foreign sentiment, as noted by the rise, at least in Detroit of the "Out of a job yet? Keep buying foreign!" bumper stickers, usually adorning either a rusted-out Ford Ranger or Contour (many of which were assembled in Mexico,) or a new Dodge Ram (many of which are assembled in Mexico,) or Ford F-350. The more genuine sentiment, I think, should be, "Out of a job yet? Keep dumbing down yourself and your family!" Go ahead, lack that ambition, and spirit of self-enterprise; heck, the founding fathers relied on complacency and endless coddling by the British, didn't they? Oh, wait, that's right, they didn't! They felt that they were being 'jacked on the whole idea that despite all the money they were paying to the British, they still had nothing to say about what was happening. And they did something about it. Something real. And as it turned out, cultural and economic isolationism have never served America very well. Besides, given the foreign interchange that occurs currently, to codify any kind of nationalist mind-set would put us even deeper in the hole than we are right now. What we really need to shove the lid on, and weld it in place when we're done, is greed. British greed made America, and Wall Street's greed put us in the Great Depression, not to mention the recession we're in currently. I'm not gonna go all Socialist equity here, but come on; as a country, and as individuals, we should all know what we really need. If the rest of the world can live the way they do, and still find adequate means to express themselves without the need (generally,) for 150-room mansions and H1 Hummers for every member of the family, why can't America?! Mind you, the whole idea of the following runs counter to all this, and frankly, is an amusing, if rather touchy concept:
Colombia Confronts Drug Lord’s Legacy: Hippos
By SIMON ROMERO
Published: September 10, 2009
DORADAL, Colombia — Even in Colombia, a country known for its paramilitary death squads, this hunting party stood out: more than a dozen soldiers from a Colombian Army battalion, two Porsche salesmen armed with long-range rifles, their assistant, and a taxidermist.
Outrage ensued after the release of a photo of soldiers next to the carcass of Pepe, killed in Puerto Berrío.
They stalked Pepe through the backlands of Colombia for three days in June before executing him in a clearing about 60 miles from here with shots to his head and heart. But after a snapshot emerged of soldiers posing over his carcass, the group suddenly found itself on the defensive.
As it turned out, Pepe — a hippopotamus who escaped from his birthplace near the pleasure palace built here by the slain drug lord Pablo Escobar — had a following of his own.
The meticulously organized operation to hunt Pepe down, carried out with the help of environmentalists, has become the focus of an unusually fierce debate over animal rights and the containment of invasive species in a country still struggling to address a broad range of rights violations during four decades of protracted war with guerrillas.
“In Colombia, there is no documented case of an attack against people or that they damaged any crops,” said Aníbal Vallejo, president of the Society for the Protection of Animals in Medellín, referring to the hippos. “No sufficient motive to sacrifice one of these animals has emerged in the 28 years since Pablo Escobar brought them to his hacienda.”
Sixteen years after the infamous Mr. Escobar was gunned down on a Medellín rooftop in a manhunt, Colombia is still wrestling with the mess he made.
Wildlife experts from Africa brought here to study Colombia’s growing numbers of hippos, a legacy of Mr. Escobar’s excesses, have in recent days bolstered the government’s plan to prevent them — by force, if necessary — from spreading into areas along the nation’s principal river. But some animal-rights activists are so opposed to the idea of killing them that they have called for the firing of President Álvaro Uribe’s environment minister.
Peter Morkel, a consultant for the Frankfurt Zoological Society in Tanzania, compared the potential for the hippos to disrupt Colombian ecosystems to the agitation caused by alien species elsewhere, like goats on the Galápagos Islands, cats on Marion Island between Antarctica and South Africa, or pythons in Florida.
“Colombia is absolute paradise for hippos, with its climate, vegetation and no natural predators,” Mr. Morkel said.
“But as much as I love hippos, they are an alien species and extremely dangerous to people who disrupt them,” he continued. “Since castration of the males is very difficult, the only realistic option is to shoot those found off the hacienda.”
The uproar has its roots in 1981, when Mr. Escobar was busy assembling a luxurious retreat here called Hacienda Nápoles that included a Mediterranean-style mansion, swimming pools, a 1,000-seat bull ring and an airstrip.
“He needed a tranquil place to unwind with his family,” said Fernando Montoya, 57, a sculptor from Medellín who built giant statues here of Tyrannosaurus rex and other dinosaurs for Mr. Escobar.
Hired by private administrators of the seized estate, part of which is now a theme park (imagine mixing “Jurassic Park” and “Scarface” into a theme), Mr. Montoya rebuilt the same statues after looters tore them apart searching for hidden booty.
But Mr. Escobar was not content with just fake dinosaurs and bullfights. In what ecologists describe as possibly the continent’s most ambitious effort to assemble a collection of species foreign to South America, he imported animals like zebras, giraffes, kangaroos, rhinoceroses and, of course, hippopotamuses.
Some of the animals died or were transferred to zoos around the time Mr. Escobar was killed. But the hippos largely stayed put, flourishing in the artificial lakes dug at Mr. Escobar’s behest.
Carlos Palacio, 54, head of animal husbandry at Nápoles, said Mr. Escobar started in 1981 with four hippos. Now, he said, at least 28 live on the estate. “With our current level of six births a year set to climb, we could easily have more than 100 hippos on this hacienda in a decade,” Mr. Palacio said.
“Some experts see this herd as a treasure of the natural world in case Africa’s hippo population suffers a sharp decline,” Mr. Palacio continued. “Others view our growth as a kind of time bomb.”
The number of hippos on the hacienda could have reached 31 had Pepe, the slain hippo, not clashed about three years ago with the herd’s dominant hippo, then left with a mate for other pastures. Once established near Puerto Berrío, the mate gave birth to a calf.
Faced with the possibility of a nascent colony away from Nápoles, Colombian authorities decided to act. After all, hippos, despite their docile appearance, are thought to kill more people in Africa than any other large animal.
Unable to find a zoo that would accept the three hippos in Puerto Berrío, officials in the department, or province, of Antioquia considered their options.
Capturing them was expensive, costing as much as $40,000 for each hippo, in a country where malnourishment among the poor remains a major problem, said Luis Alfonso Escobar — not related to Pablo Escobar — head of Corantioquia, a state environmental organization. Taking them to Africa was dangerous, in addition to being expensive, because of the new diseases they might introduce there.
So the officials opted for a hunt and hired a nonprofit conservation group, the Neotropical Wildlife Foundation, to help manage the operation.
The foundation brought in two experienced hunters, Federico Pfeil-Schneider and Christian Pfeil-Schneider, both of whom also represent the car manufacturer Porsche in Colombia. To ensure the hunting party’s safety, the environmentalists also secured an escort of soldiers.
All went as planned until the hunt’s details and the photo of the soldiers appeared in the news media. Outrage ensued. Newspapers speculated on the fate of Pepe’s severed head. (Luis Alfonso Escobar, of Corantioquia, rejected rumors that it went to the hunters.) A judge in Medellín issued a ruling suspending the hunt for Pepe’s mate and their offspring.
Meanwhile, other hippos may be on the loose. Mr. Palacio, the hippo caretaker here, said at least one was lurking in the waters of a neighboring ranch. Mr. Morkel, the veterinarian, said one or two others could have wandered off, according to local reports.
On the grounds of Hacienda Nápoles, a sign warns visitors to the theme park. “Stay in your vehicle after 6 p.m.,” it reads. “Hippopotamuses on the road.”

Okay, yes, conceptually it proves the point that the rest of the world is not all grass huts and Birkenstocks, but it also makes the point about the danger of greed; A Colombian drug lord, a man who was pretty much the OED definition of greed, wanted Hippos for the palace, (although God only knows why,) and now, even after his death, they're still the same invasive species anything else of its ilk would be. And with that, I would appear to be begging people to do what I think they always should; think a little.